Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS news anchor who became known as “the most trusted man in America” while reporting on some of the darkest and most joyous events of the 20th century, died today at the age of 92.

A CBS executive says he died at his home in New York. CBS vice president Linda Mason says Cronkite passed on at 7:42 p.m. after a long fight against cerebral vascular disease. His family was by his side.

From 1962 to 1981 Cronkite brought a unique insight and sense of gravitas to the anchor chair of the CBS Evening News.

He became a trusted voice who shared the tears of the nation when President John F. Kennedy was killed, and who became a lightning rod for controversy when his pronouncement of the Vietnam war as a “stalemate” helped to change the course of the conflict.

Born in 1916 in St. Joseph, Mo., Cronkite knew he wanted to be a newsman from an early age.

“I think I was 12 or 13 years old when it first hit, really, that I wanted to be a reporter–came from a magazine article in a magazine called American Boy magazine,” he said in a 1997 interview with WNBC’s Gabe Pressman. “And they were doing a series of–of short stories on various occupations as sort of career guidance pieces.”

Cronkite’s career took off with his coverage of World War II, in which he reported from the thick of the fight in Europe and North Africa as a correspondent for United Press.

He came ashore on D-Day and got closer to the action than most of today’s reporters would ever dare.

While covering a bombing mission as a civilian over Germany, he actually manned a .50-caliber machine gun in the plane when one of the airmen in the crew was killed.

“[I] took the starboard gun and I shot down Focke-Wulfs, Messerschmidts and [B-24] Liberators and other [B-17 Flying] Fortresses,” he quipped in the 1997 interview.

“No, I hope I didn’t hit any of our own aircraft. I don’t think I hit any of the enemy either.”

Cronkite’s joined CBS news in 1950, and was promoted to anchor in 1962.

The next year he would interview President Kennedy only two months before the president was shot in Dallas.

Cronkite was anchoring the CBS news broadcast when then-reporter Dan Rather first reported that Kennedy had been killed. Breaking with the news industry standard of stoic objectivity, Cronkite famously took off his glasses and shed a tear on camera after learning the tragic news.

Cronkite’s broadcast led the ratings from 1967 on.

His power was on full display in 1968, when he reported from Vietnam during the infamous Tet offensive, saying: “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate.”

Public respect for Cronkite – who had initially been Hawkish on the war – was so strong that public opinion for the conflict fell.

Some military veterans, and supporters of the war said that Tet was unfairly portrayed as a defeat by the media, and harbor resentment towards Cronkite.

But the effect of the newsman’s few words on the issue were strong.

“Many observers, including presidential aide Bill Moyers speculated that this was a major factor contributing to President Lyndon B.

Johnson’s decision to offer to negotiate with the enemy and not to run for President in l968,” wrote Cronkite biographer Albert Auster, on the Museum of Broadcast Communications web site.

Cronkite would break with protocol again a year later – but for a much happier moment in history. When the Apollo XI mission landed on the moon in 1969, he famously shouted “Oh boy! Whew, boy!”

Long before non-stop cable news channels and the Internet diluted the power of the nightly network news programs, Cronkite’s CBS was able to help set the national agenda.

When he ended each broadcast with his familiar catch phrase “And that’s the way it was,” for millions of American that statement was an unassailable fact.

In 1973, a poll named him “the most trusted man in America.”

When, during the Iran hostage crisis, he modified his sign-off to add the number of days that the ordeal had continued, he put significant pressure on the Carter administration of act.

He retired in 1981, passing the torch to Rather.

Cronkite was married for 65 years to his wife Elizabeth “Betsy”

Cronkite, who died in 2005 at age 89. They have three children and four grandchildren.

A long-time sailing buff, in 2006 he started dating Joanna Simon, a Realtor and big sister of singer Carly Simon.

“We are keeping company, as the old phrase used to be,” he told The Post in 2006.

Cronkite is the winner of the prestigious Polk and Peabody journalism awards, and in 1981 was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor a civilian can receive in the U.S.